When Stress Becomes Stressed Out – 5 Ways to Outsmart the Invisible Killer: Presented by Dr. Neha Sangwan

Dr. Neha Sangwan
Dr. Neha Sangwan

[Thanks to William Harryman at Integral Options Café for posting about this talk.]

I’m impressed with Dr. Sangwan, and her new venture called Intuitive Intelligence strikes me as a fine example of an approach to Integral Health. Here’s a bit about the philosophy behind their approach:

i Think: How I Think impacts how I feel, what I eat, and what I say. All of these affect whether I’m inspired to do the right things for my health.
i Say: What I Say is related to my stress level and how I think and feel at any given time. The conversation I’ve been avoiding can affect how healthy I eat, and what I do (exercise or sleep).
i Feel: How I Feel is a direct result of what I think and say in relationships. My feelings are set in motion by how I eat (habits), and what I do (exercise).
i Eat: What I Eat affects everything from how I think , my moods and how I feel, to what I say. Chances are if my eating is erratic, my motivation to do (action, productivity & results) will be also!
i Do: What I Do, ranging from exercise to pursuing my goals, are motivated by what I think, feel and say. My choices are greatly influenced by how healthy (or unhealthy) I eat.

Sounds pretty integral to me. Now onto her recent talk at Google. Enjoy!:

When Stress Becomes Stressed Out – 5 Ways to Outsmart the Invisible Killer

Presented by Dr. Neha Sangwan.

ABSTRACT [From GoogleTechTalks]

You love your job. You also feel stressed by the constant pressure to perform. Sometimes short-term stress is helpful. It can motivate you to meet a deadline or even prompt a rapid response that can save your life. However, 95% of all illness is caused or worsened by ongoing stress. When you’re stressed-out, your body releases a powerful set of hormones that raise your blood pressure, hinder your critical thinking and keep you up at night. And the more you’re exposed to stress, the greater your capacity to numb out your body’s warning signals that you’re headed for disaster. So the question is; When you think you’re being productive, how do you know if you’re actually on the slippery slope to burnout? In this experiential talk, learn to outsmart the invisible killer by discovering 5 ways you can respond to internal and external stress.

Sam Harris: We are lost in thought

The Edge Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” This year the foundation posed the following question to 164 of the world’s leading intellectuals:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

Sam Harris–author, neuroscientist, and CEO of Project Reason–responded with a reminder that “We are lost in thought.” Harris has studied and practiced meditation for many years, and I especially appreciate how he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being (as I’ve discussed before). An integral study of attention (Attentionology?) is something I’m very interested in exploring and developing, and Harris is a great resource in this respect. Here’s his full response to The Edge Question 2011:

We are Lost in Thought

“I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. Linguistic thought is indispensable to us. It is the basis for planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the substance of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with the flow of thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering and confusion.

Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It’s as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.

Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.”

Dr. Ben Goldacre on The Placebo Effect

I’m a long-time fan of Dr. Ben Goldacre and his blog, Bad Science. Yesterday I finally got around to listening to the BBC Radio program Dr. Goldacre did in 2008 about the placebo effect. It’s a two-part program that takes us through many of the most intriguing experiments and philosophical implications of this truly amazing phenomenon.

Most people are generally familiar with the placebo effect and understand that expectations play a role in health and can affect our responses to various treatments. I think many would be surprised, however, just how dramatic this effect can be, and just how radically we may have to revise our current understanding of health and disease in light of the latest research findings.

You can also follow the interesting discussion about the program on Dr. Goldacre’s blog post, and also check out a couple of videos of Dr. Goldacre discussing the topic:

Dennis Kucinich: The for-profit health care system is the problem

I like Dennis Kucinich. The guy has guts, and he’s persistent in arguing for universal, not-for-profit healthcare, despite being ignored by his colleagues in Congress and by the majority of Americans. He’s long been one of the very few truly progressive voices in Washington. Incidentally, an effort is underway to eliminate Kucinich’s congressional district.

Whether or not one agrees with Kucinich’s perspective on healthcare, it’s important to note that our economic and social systems have a huge impact on health. In terms of the four-quadrant, cover-all-the-bases, integral approach to health that I’m exploring on this website, Kucinich is offering an inter-objective, lower-right quadrant perspective. Health is not just a matter of how our physical organism is functioning; not just about our state of mind; not just about our cultural norms. All three of these dimensions must be taken into account, in addition to the social systems dimension, which Kucinich addresses here from his own perspective [Congressman Kucinich delivered the following statement on the Floor of the House of Representatives on January 19, 2011]:

“We have a for-profit health care system, where $800,000,000,000 every year is spent on corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paperwork.

“In the for-profit system that we have, nearly one out of every three health care dollars goes for things not related to health care. If we took that $800,000,000,000 and spent it on care for people, we’d have enough money to cover all medically necessary needs in addition to dental care, vision care, mental health care, prescription drugs and long-term care.

“We would not have a situation where 50 million Americans don’t have any health insurance. Americans would not have to worry about losing everything they have worked a lifetime for because they have an illness in the family.

“This debate is the wrong debate. A for-profit model is the wrong model. We should be talking about universal health care, single-payer not-for-profit health care, Medicare for All, quality health care for all Americans.”

Stress Soup: Dr. Elissa Epel presents “The New Science of Stress and Stress Resilience”

The following presentation is part of a series sponsored by UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine called Life in Balance: Strategies for Optimal Health from the Science of Integrative Medicine. In this talk, Elissa Epel, PhD discusses some of the latest research regarding the ways that stress and stress resilience can affect health. A few of the take-home messages:

• Stress is a serious risk factor for health that’s rooted not only in our minds, but also in our bodies, brains and cells.

• Stress is unavoidable, but we can improve stress resilience through exercise, social connection, cultivating mindfulness and positive psychological states, and developing awareness of arousal and learning to control it through relaxed breathing.

• A situation that stresses me out might not bother you at all, but perceived stress is all that is needed for us to produce a kind of “stress soup” in our cells that can negatively impact both our physical and psychological well-being.

• Mindful awareness and relaxed breathing can change the “stress soup” inside of us in healthful ways.

“The decline effect”: Why transparency in science is a good thing

Johah Lehrer wrote a fascinating article (The Truth Wears Off) in The New Yorker last month about the “decline effect” in scientific research, which he describes as the tendency of initially promising results to fade over time. In the process of exploring this tendency, Lehrer discusses some of the well-known processes that can distort the scientific enterprise, including selective reporting of results by scientists and the publication biases of peer-reviewed journals. All in all, I thought it was an interesting, fair, thought-provoking piece that gives a general audience some sense of how our human foibles can distort even the most objective of endeavors.

And so I was a bit surprised to see Dr. John M. Grohol, whom I greatly admire and whose blogging I’ve been appreciating for years, dismiss Lehrer’s piece as “a somewhat dumbed-down and sensationalistic article” (Is Science Dead? In a Word: No). Dr. Grohol credits biology professor and science blogger PZ Myers with publishing the best rebuttal (Science is not dead) to Lehrer, which includes a nice list of possible explanations for why “statistical results from scientific studies that showed great significance early in the analysis are less and less robust in later studies”:

Regression to the mean: As the number of data points increases, we expect the average values to regress to the true mean…and since often the initial work is done on the basis of promising early results, we expect more data to even out a fortuitously significant early outcome.

The file drawer effect: Results that are not significant are hard to publish, and end up stashed away in a cabinet. However, as a result becomes established, contrary results become more interesting and publishable.

Investigator bias: It’s difficult to maintain scientific dispassion. We’d all love to see our hypotheses validated, so we tend to consciously or unconsciously select reseults that favor our views.

Commercial bias: Drug companies want to make money. They can make money off a placebo if there is some statistical support for it; there is certainly a bias towards exploiting statistical outliers for profit.

Population variance: Success in a well-defined subset of the population may lead to a bit of creep: if the drug helps this group with well-defined symptoms, maybe we should try it on this other group with marginal symptoms. And it doesn’t…but those numbers will still be used in estimating its overall efficacy.

Simple chance: This is a hard one to get across to people, I’ve found. But if something is significant at the p=0.05 level, that still means that 1 in 20 experiments with a completely useless drug will still exhibit a significant effect.

Statistical fishing: I hate this one, and I see it all the time. The planned experiment revealed no significant results, so the data is pored over and any significant correlation is seized upon and published as if it was intended. See previous explanation. If the data set is complex enough, you’ll always find a correlation somewhere, purely by chance.

I have no problem deferring to both Myers’s and Grohol’s expertise in science, and I find them each to be thoughtful writers, but I think they both significantly misread Lehrer. For instance, Grohol inaccurately states that “what Lehrer failed to note is that most researchers already know about the flaws he describes”. Lehrer most certainly did not fail on that account, as he makes clear in his concluding paragraph:

And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything.

Myers likewise implies that Lehrer is making a “fuss” out of problems that scientists already know about, and he assures his readers that everything is under control, that “science works [and] that’s all that counts.” As Myers sees it, Lehrer is “overselling of the flaws in the science” and ultimately offers us a conclusion that is “complete bullshit.” The bulk of the commenters on Myers’s post are even more damning of Lehrer, many implying that he’s basically an idiot who should be ashamed of himself for providing fodder for the anti-science/anti-intellectual movement that many see as a growing problem in the United States.

I think that taking a “defender of science” stance is to miss the main point of Lehrer’s piece. The article was published in The New Yorker, to a general audience who most definitely does NOT know about all the biases and corrupting influences that Lehrer, Myers, and Grohol each mention in their respective pieces. The scientific method is just a tool, and a fine one at that. But the way science is actually done in our society has become increasingly corrupted by special interest groups and the profit motive. In this sense science is no different than other tools we have at our disposal, like our system of democracy, our free press, the internet, guns, etc. It’s not being anti-anything to bring attention to ways our tools can be and are being misused. It’s not anti-American to point out the ways our political system has become corrupted, and it’s not anti-science for Lehrer to highlight the ways in which scientists often fall short of optimal objectivity.

Lehrer published a follow-up article (More thoughts on the decline effect) in which he quotes a critique from Dr. Robert Johnson of Wayne State Medical School:

Creationism and skepticism of climate change are popularly-held opinions; Lehrer’s closing words play into the hands of those who want to deny evolution, global warming, and other realities. I fear that those who wish to persuade Americans that science is just one more pressure group, and that the scientific method is a matter of opinion, will be eager to use his conclusion to advance their cause.

I think this gets right to the heart of the matter and explains why, in my opinion, so many scientists have been inclined to dismiss Lehrer. Yes, anti-intellectual types might seize on Lehrer’s piece to further their agendas, but they’re going to find support for their lunacy one way or another. The fact of the matter remains: transparency in science is a good thing. As Lehrer reminds us:

We know science works. But can it work better? There is too much at stake to not ask that question. Furthermore, the public funds a vast majority of basic research—it deserves to know about any problems.

Science may be the best tool we have for advancing knowledge, but that doesn’t mean we should trust, on face value, what’s reported in the media as science, nor should we blindly accept the conclusions of scientific organizations and authorites. The scientific method may be just fine, but like all professions and institutions in our society, money and ego are becoming increasingly corrupting influences. Corruption has to be exposed in order to be dealt with constructively. As Lehrer concludes (and I think both Grohol and Myers would agree):

The larger point, though, is that there is nothing inherently mysterious about why the scientific process occasionally fails or the decline effect occurs. As Jonathan Schooler, one of the scientists featured in the article told me, “I’m convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this”—the decline effect—“out. First, though, we have to admit that we’ve got a problem.”

Misunderstanding addiction: The beat goes on…

Stanton Peele
Back in May I wrote a post titled Understanding Addiction, throughout which I bemoaned the fact that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — one of the most powerful voices on matters of health and well-being in our society — continues to perpetuate the misunderstanding that “Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease.” Taking a partial truth and stretching it — so that it seems far more significant than it actually is — is the modus operandi of huksters in every sphere, and it’s becoming an all-too-familiar gambit of mental health “experts” these days. Shockingly, my blog posts don’t seem to be helping matters much. Stanton Peele, however, continues to be a lonesome but powerful voice of reason, calling out to those of us with ears to listen. Earlier this month, Peele reminded us on his blog that the NIH’s own alcoholism experts (within The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol) recently concluded the following:

1. 20 years after onset of alcohol dependence, about three-fourths of individuals are in full recovery; more than half of those who have fully recovered drink at low-risk levels without symptoms of alcohol dependence.
2. About 75 percent of persons who recover from alcohol dependence do so without seeking any kind of help, including specialty alcohol (rehab) programs and AA. Only 13 percent of people with alcohol dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment.

These conclusions, based on the largest study of people’s life histories of alcohol use ever conducted (43,000 people), completely undercut the accepted wisdom that addiction (to alcohol, at the very least) is a “relapsing brain disease,” and they also bring into sharp relief the utter ineffectiveness of the most commonly utilized treatment programs. Beyond this study, the accepted wisdom regarding addiction also fails the tests of sound reasoning, common sense, and an honest appraisal of existing evidence — a case that Peele has been persuasively making for decades. And yet when Americans want the best available information and recommendations about addiction to alcohol and other drugs, we’re told by Dr. Drew, HBO, and the NIH that addicts have a relapsing brain disease, that they can never learn to moderate their drug use, and that their incurable diseases can be most effectively treated by checking into rehab and attending twelve-step meetings. Is it any wonder why our best efforts to help people with drug problems are so ineffective?

Sadly, if we instead look to the most renowned non-government authority on matters of mental health, the American Psychiatric Association, we’ll find only further confusion. In another blog post, Peele describes the APA’s latest attempts to redefine the concept of addiction for the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-5. Peele was an advisor for the substance abuse disorders section of the current version of the DSM, DSM-IV, so he understands the process well. The upshot is that the DSM-5 Substance-Related Disorders Work Group, chaired by University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Charles O’Brien, is proposing some major changes, including ditching the term “dependence” in favor of “addiction” (a term not used in the DSM-IV to describe substance abuse problems). Beyond that, the group also wants to create a whole new category–Behavioral Addiction–to refer to pathological gambling. The rationale behind designating only pathological gambling as an addiction (but not pathological sex-having or video game playing or anything else) is that, according to O’Brien, “substantive research” indicates that “pathological gambling and substance-use disorders are very similar in the way they affect the brain and neurological reward system.” Peele, as he’s done his entire career, clearly shows the fallaciousness of O’Brien’s reasoning, which suffers from the same confusions and category errors that have been holding our understanding of addiction (and mental health, more broadly) hostage for decades:

O’Brien’s statement represents a rear-guard effort to frame addiction as a brain disease. There is, indeed, imaging research on the ways various drugs affect the brain. But that’s not the key to addiction. I designed and administer an addiction treatment program, and I can assure you that not one person is sent to our program—or any other program—because of a PET scan. People enter rehab because of regular, habitual screwups connected to substance use—compulsive involvement and continued use of a drug (or other involvements) despite chronic harm.

Indeed, as O’Brien points out, powerful experiences like gambling impact the same “neurological reward system” that drugs do. But so do many other rewarding activities. If there is some such higher level “neurological reward system,” then it can’t be said to exclude anything, from sex to food to gambling to video games.

Nor is O’Brien correct in suggesting that cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana follow the same neurological pathways in the brain. Each substance has a very different chemical profile, including the timing of effects and the rewards people derive.

And if gambling affects the same brain reward system as substances, as O’Brien claims, why is it a “behavioral” addiction and not simply an addiction? DSM-5 further muddies understanding of addiction in its handling of two other non-drug appetites—“hypersexuality” and “binge-eating.” Neither is regarded as an addiction. Is this because they do not follow the same “neural reward pathways” as drugs and gambling? Binge-drinking can bring on addiction, but not binge-eating? How come? And is gambling really more neurologically, or intensely, rewarding than sex?

The problem with the DSM-5 approach is in viewing the nature of addiction as a characteristic of specific substances (now with the addition of a single activity). But think about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): People are not diagnosed based on the specific habit they repeat—be it hand-washing or checking locked doors. They are diagnosed with OCD because of how life-disruptive and compulsive the habit is. Similarly, addictive disorders are about how badly a habit harms a person’s life. Whether people use OxyContin or alcohol, people aren’t addicted unless they experience a range of disruptive problems—no matter how addictive the same drug may be for others.

Unfortunately, misunderstanding and misinformation are becoming part and parcel in health education across-the-board in our society. As with our political system, the agencies and organizations responsible for informing the public about matters of health and well-being have been way too corrupted by special interest groups (particularly) and the profit motive (more generally). Moving toward a sensible, fact-based, integral understanding of health requires that we critically appraise and analyze all information that comes to us, not only from the media, but also from the “leading experts” themselves. I have no doubt that the vast majority of individuals working at the NIH, the APA, as well as the countless mental health professionals across the country serving people in need, have only the best of intentions and want above all else to make a positive difference in the world. The same can be said of the members of the United States Congress, but a system can become corrupt, broken, and ultimately ineffective (even destructive) despite the good intentions of most individuals within the system. Our current way of understanding and treating addiction — like the broader “war on drugs” we’ve been impotently waging for years — just isn’t cutting it. Stanton Peele may not have all the answers, but his approach makes a lot of sense to me.

Integrative Spirituality

28kbbob51107.jpg[The following is my contribution to an online symposium that Julian Walker organized several years ago called Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perspectives. The website that hosted the symposium no longer exists, so I’m reposting my essay here for posterity (in a slightly edited form, to fit the new context). Some of this essay might overlap a bit with my Embodiment of Freedom articles and, like those pieces, it’s a bit more academic/theoretical in style compared to how I typically write these days. Also, this was written before neuroplasticity became such a hot topic, and before the recent explosion in interest of mindfulness-based health interventions. It’s heartening to see how much progress is being made toward a more integral understanding of health and well-being.]

Breakfast at Tiffany’s:
Last night I picked up my guitar and inexplicably broke into “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the mid-nineties hit from Deep Blue Something. I was killing time waiting for my wife to finish brushing her teeth and whatnot. She heard my rendition and started to sing along. Next thing you know we’re in the way-back machine, trying to remember that Blues Traveler song, you know, the one that was such a big hit. “No, not the ‘Hook’ song, the other one, the one that came out before that.” It was right on the tip of my tongue, and I’d only just begun to wrack my brain for the answer when my wife said, “Hold on, I’ll just Google it.” Ten seconds later, the issue was settled, but I wasn’t. It occurred to me that my reliance on Google was messing with my ability to access my long-term memory. Hec, in twenty years I might have to Google my own name to remember who’s looking back at me in the mirror.

This experience is just the latest reminder that everything I do has an impact on the way I am, and that the way I am places limits on what I’m able to do, and then round and round I go forming a pattern that becomes my way of life. Come to think of it, it’s pretty mind-blowing to fathom that something as seemingly trivial as Googling can, overtime, literally change the structure of my brain. Use it or lose it baby, and no matter if we’re talking muscle, bone, vision, hearing, or cortical neural networks, there’s no doubt that how we live literally changes who we are. It’s downright freaky, the sheer sense of responsibility.

The understanding here is that human beings, like all forms of life, are functionally malleable. That is to say, we continually adapt to the givens of our environmental situation, which for us includes a cultural dimension. The plasticity of our organisms, especially our central nervous systems, allows for the possibility, the inevitability really, of continual change as we flex and flow in dynamic relationship with ourselves, culture and nature. What’s also unbelievably mind-blowing to me is how this simple, commonsense understanding of the somatic foundations of personal transformation is so conspicuously absent from contemporary discourse in fields as far-reaching and diverse as medicine, psychology, and spirituality. That, in a nutshell, is my intention here, to show how a functional, somatic, experiential perspective can give an Integrative Spirituality some ground to stand on.

Who’s gonna do what now?
So what exactly is it that’s being integrated in an integrative spirituality? The question presupposes a dis-integration or lack of unity, a state of fragmentation or at least chaotic differentiation. For me, the integral impulse is primarily a movement toward the direct experience of integrity, a movement from a sense of alienation and disconnect to one of authenticity, conviviality and freedom. It’s about moving from developmental arrest to realization of our full potential as humans.

The rubber meets the road in the immediacy of my directly felt experience, right now, and integrity is embodied, lived out, expressed in my actions on a daily basis. This practical dimension is, in fact, what interests me most, and I will get to the nitty-gritty of my practice shortly. However, since I ground my understanding of integrative spirituality in terms of embodiment, somatic awareness, and movement, I want to be clear on some theoretical issues.

For my money, an integrative spirituality is a transformative spirituality, and as such it must get to the roots of our being. Philosopher Ken Wilber has consistently claimed that the centaur level — where “mind and body are experienced as an integrated self” – is the jumping off place from the realm of the personal to the transpersonal. In Sex Ecology Spirituality, he went as far as to herald the centaur as “the next major stage of leading-edge global transformation.” I agree with this completely, and would add that an integrative spirituality can be neither grounded nor optimally transformative without presupposing a firm centauric foundation, i.e. a certain degree of bodymind integrity.

As to the question “What transforms?” in the process of personal transformation, I’d say, well, “the person,” which at the centaur stage can be thought of as the bodymind or organism. This is a philosophical rabbit-hole I’d rather not go down here, but I should add an important caveat from Alan Watts: “Man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship. The relationship is, as it were, more real than its two terms, somewhat as the inner unity of a stick is more solid than the difference of its two ends.” So, more precisely, I would say that personal transformation is about transforming one’s way of life, the mode from which a person experiences and participates in life. The point of all this being that most of us cannot continue to grow optimally or live fully without first and foremost understanding, accepting and effectively responding to the reality of dissociation and alienation. Of course, maybe I’m the only one with unfinished dissociative business to clear up, but I doubt it. In any event, there’s not much point in building more and more stories onto a building if the foundation is not properly in place.

It is the lack of a smoothly integrated, firm foundation — in our ways of thinking, acting and in the very cores our being – that, in my opinion, accounts for the confusion and inadequacy that characterizes so much of contemporary spiritual discourse. I stress the notion of embodiment because I think it is too often glossed over that we experience life in, through and as embodied organisms, bodyminds that are typically plagued with habitual patterns of constriction. These constrictions are embedded in the very structure of our bodies and nervous systems, giving rise to a sense of dissociation and alienation, which in turn gets expressed in distorted perception, thought and action.

Given the right conditions, development happens of its own accord. An acorn will rather effortlessly become an oak tree, so long as there’s rich soil, adequate water and light, and so on. Throw an acorn in your closet, however, and it will only dry up and crumble into dust. I see human development in much the same light. It requires a healthy relationship with our environment, which for human beings has both natural and cultural dimensions. In fact, as Watts reminded us, this relationship is as much “what we are” as anything.

Enter the somatic perspective, my understanding of which is grounded in the work of my mentors in the field, Don Hanlon Johnson and Thomas Hanna.

Alienation vs. authenticity:
Johnson describes how the dissociative fabric of contemporary culture is sewn into individual lives through a “technology of alienation,” whereby beliefs and non-verbal body-shaping techniques are etched into our brains and bodies. This process leaves us cut off from the sources of knowing necessary for full living and continued growth. Since we respond to all situations as embodied beings, losing touch with the immediacy of felt experience will render us unable to perceive the subtle changes that allow us to sense whether a situation is likely to enhance or diminish the quality of our lives. To the degree we lack a firm sense of embodiment, we are ignorant of how to live situations in an authentic way.

Authenticity, as Johnson points, originally meant “to have a sense that one’s actions and feelings are one’s own.” When one is firmly grounded in the integrated centaur, one has access to a “sensual authority,” a mode of awareness and expression rooted in the self-directing, self-regulatory capacities of the healthy, non-constricted organism. It is the technology of alienation that arrests further development, keeping us stuck with a sense of void between my “mind” and my “body,” between “me” and “the world.” Lacking contact with our sensual authority, we look outside ourselves for some basis on how to live our lives. We give doctors authority over our bodies, psychologist authority over our minds, and religious leaders authority over our spirits. Unfortunately, the current discourse in all those fields mostly perpetuates the status quo of an unnecessarily pathological degree of dissociation and alienation. The shift from alienation to authenticity requires that we develop our impoverished self-sensing capacities and that we learn to check the dictates of outside authorities against this growing base of awareness.

Practice, practice, practice…
The processes that work to shape people into alignment with societal agendas, that lead to experiences of bodymind dissociation, influence people’s lives only to the extent that human beings are, like I mentioned above, functionally malleable. In contrast to the technology of alienation, which takes advantage of this malleability to undermine people’s sensual authority, Johnson described another way of integrating techniques, one that encourages people to develop and connect to their unique store of embodied wisdom. Johnson calls this alternative “the technology of authenticity”.

The many technologies of authenticity (including experiential psychotherapy, Gendlin’s “focusing” process, various somatic approaches, and many forms of mindfulness meditation) are practical strategies that: (1) facilitate the recovery and further development of an individual’s inherent self-sensing capacities (i.e. one’s sense of embodied authority), and (2) provide an environment or context where authentic expression of this newly expanded awareness can be explored, supported and encouraged.

Ken Wilber said the following in his book One Taste (Thanks to Hokai Sobol for pointing this out):

“There are four major stages of spiritual unfolding: belief, faith, direct experience, and permanent adaptation: you can believe in Spirit, you can have faith in Spirit, you can directly experience Spirit, you can become Spirit…. If you are interested in genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher and begin practice. Without practice, you will never move beyond the phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences. You will never evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent adaptation. You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory of your own higher estate, a tourist of you own true Self.”

This is a brilliant way to frame the process of personal transformation, I think. My own core practices [the specifics of which I’ll save for another conversation] stem from a set of principles that I apply to as many life situations as possible. This is a slightly different take on the concept of Integral Life Practice, in that instead of gathering a variety of existing approaches and techniques together for the purposes of “cross-training” or “exercising” various levels of my being and whatnot, my approach has been to explore, understand and experiment with the essential principles that seem to be operative during any and all my transformative or peak experiences, regardless of the context. I like the distinction Don Hanlon Johnson makes between principles and techniques. Whereas an emphasis on particular techniques can encourage imitation, repetition, and an over-reliance on those considered to be experts, principles are fundamental sources of discovery that encourage open-ended inquiry and can generate creative strategies for approaching unique situations.

Principles of personal transformation:
Alan Watts said: “The way in which we interpret mystical experience must be plausible. That is to say, it must fit in with and/or throw light upon the best available knowledge about life and the universe.” Understanding and incorporating the somatic dimension does not mean that all we need to do is bodywork or focus on our feelings. We do, I think, need to understand how all aspects of life and culture play out on a somatic level, simply because the living body, in its structural and functional aspects, is fundamental to transformation as it unfolds on deeper (or more significant, in Wilber’s scheme) levels, such as the psychological and spiritual.

Here’s how I understand the relationships, in a nutshell: 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 feedback 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.” Hanna argues that many of the 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.

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. It is my contention that effective psychotherapy and transformative spiritual practices, as processes necessarily rooted in the central nervous system of the organism, are effective only to the degree they take advantage of the organism’s capacity for somatic learning. Psychologists from Carl Rogers to Eugine Gendlin have discovered as much, as have mindfulness meditation advocates like Alan Watts and Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The crux of the matter is thus: personal transformation is the movement that springs from authentic relationship, from embodied encounter. Transformation is the movement from alienation to authenticity; the movement toward progressively deeper and expanded levels of awareness and authentic expression. On the level of sensorimotor functioning we understand this transformation as the movement from sensorimotor amnesia to somatic learning. From a psychological perspective this transformation is the movement from psychological dis-ease to psychological growth and self-actualization, or from unconsciousness to consciousness, or from pathology to health. In terms of ecology we’re talking about the movement from ecological crisis to ecological balance in relation to the human species. Spiritual seekers might call it the movement from suffering to inner harmony and peace, or dissociation to integration, or ignorance to enlightenment. In all contexts, the same principles can be applied, and these principles can be understood to underlie a wide range of somatic/experiential practices designed to facilitate personal transformation, each understood in terms of particular contexts of relationship.

Deadlines and Deadends:
Thanks to Julian Walker for inviting me to carry this inquiry forward a little. Unless I’m responding to another person, in dialogue or with a set deadline, I seem incapable of doing this kind of thing. Death is the ultimate deadline, I suppose. Perhaps I need to meditate on that a while to motivate me to write the book that’s been rattling around in my head for years now.

Basically, this whole inquiry began when 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.

There is a way to live that opens me up and a way that shuts me down. For me, the whole process comes down to this: When I’m open (whether through luck, effort or grace), and I have the guts and faith needed to allow whatever form of self-expression that arises to unfold, then I open up more and feel more alive and connected. In my experience, this is the fundamental attitude that is a prerequisite for spiritual growth. On the other hand, when I choose, consciously or unconsciously, to inhibit this movement in favor of a habitual, conditioned response, I feel more and more cut off, and I contract again back into an unfulfilling daze.

Coda [From Alan Watts]:

“My ego is a marriage between my (necessarily false) image or concept of myself, and the chronic muscular tension which a child learns in trying to do things which must happen spontaneously: to love, to sleep, to attend, to have bowel movements, and to control crying, pouting, or blushing. But muscular tension does not necessarily assist neural efficiency, for it hinders rather than helps when we strain our eyes to see and furrow our brows to concentrate. Yet we are forever scratching our heads, clenching our fists and jaws, holding our breath, and tightening our rectal muscles in order to will or to keep control of our feelings, and the vague persistence of this tension becomes the substantial referent of the word “I,” and the image the emotional and conceptual referent. A futility married to an illusion!”

Good sane fun

“If you want to catch a falling leaf, you have to be where the leaves are falling.” That’s what a little birdie told me, so I intentionally changed my route to work this past week so that I walked under as many trees as possible. It’s the only ritual I observe religiously. I simply must catch at least one leaf every fall. (And it has to be fresh from the branch and caught before it hits the ground. Nothing off a roof or blown up from the ground will do.) If I fail in this, it means that I’ve given up the ghost; that I’ve gotten old; that I’m no longer paying attention to what really matters. Maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but at the very least a leafless fall would mean I’m probably not walking around outside much, or I’m too often staring at the ground lost in my head, or listening to my iPod, or talking on the phone. My mindful strolls have been keeping me sane for years, and it just so happens that the number of leaves I catch each year is one of the few quantifiable measures of my degree of saneness. Best-case scenario, I’m taking a stroll to work or around the block and, without making any special effort whatsoever, a leaf just happens to float down near me and I reach out and grab it. Or, better yet, it just hits me in the face or drops in my lap. That’s the best-case scenario mind you, the one that most captures the Zen spirit of the tradition. But sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do to catch a leaf, and it’s almost November and the leaves just aren’t falling this year, at least not when I happen to be walking under a tree. The last time I was leafless this late in the season was the year I had knee surgery. I went out half-crippled and waited under a tree for an hour before getting the job done. Having not yet reached that point of desperation, I decided to start with a route change. And although the new route did take me under a fair number of trees, I couldn’t convince the air to stir up so much as a light breeze. By Friday, things were looking so bleak that I resorted to chasing squirrels up a huge oak tree, so that one of them might rustle a few leaves while running for cover. I’m not sure how that affected my sanity score, but in any event, it didn’t send any leaves into the air. On the way home from work I walked back the same way. Again, the wind wasn’t enough to blow a single hair out of place. As I approached the mighty oak, I noticed a huge hawk hanging out on the ground under it. The squirrels were all hiding under cars in the parking lot, terrified. Neither the hawk nor I was destined to make a catch right then and there, so the hawk took off and I headed home and then to Washington DC for Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

My wife and I got to our hotel room (near Dulles Airport) late, crashed on the king-sized bed, and drove to the West Falls Metro station at about 9:30am Saturday. If not for the fact that thousands people were trying to get to the National Mall by noon, I’m sure we would have made it to the rally in plenty of time, as it’s only a twenty-five minute train ride from West Falls. As it turned out, however, the trip took us five hours, so we didn’t set foot on the mall until the rally was in its final few minutes. The crowd was unbelievably massive (the estimate of 250,000 sounds about right to me), and my wife and I are both under 5 feet 7 inches tall, so we saw and heard next to nothing that was happening on the main stage. What we did see was people. Lots and lots of people. People dressed in goofy costumes. People with goofy rally signs. People waiting in line to get into the Metro station. People waiting to get on the trains. People crammed into trains, pressed up against the walls and windows and each other like in a jelly jar full of gummy bears. The truth is, it was pretty insane. The truth is, we pretty much missed the rally and didn’t really know how it all went down until we got home late last night. And the truth is, neither one of us was too disappointed. We showed up, and somehow that felt like it was enough.

So I don’t have any personal photos to share, and I can’t share my reactions to the show Stewart and Colbert put on. I missed all that. I did take away a few important things from the experience, though. First, I feel a lot better about the state of our country and about the basic goodness of the people who live here. When we finally did manage to squeeze onto to the Sane Train heading for the mall, we found ourselves packed in a tiny corner, shoulder to shoulder with every type of person imaginable—men, women, children, black, white, brown, Asian, Middle-eastern. We all had sore feet and full bladders. We were all missing the rally. But we still were kind to each other, made room, gave up our seats, shared the streaming video on our smart phones. I’ve had phrases like “People are morons” and “People are assholes” bouncing around inside my skull for too long. It feels good to think to myself “People are basically decent and good at heart.” Second, I realize now more than ever that it’s far more fulfilling to take action when I’m inspired—even if the results are disappointing or even painful—than to wallow in cynicism or surrender to the pull of inertia. Better for me to enjoy or even suffer the consequences of pushing boundaries than to snooze away in the comfort zone. Finally, I have a renewed appreciation for my wife. She was super-busy, but made time to keep me company because she knew how inspired I was by the event. The day could’ve gone a lot smoother and we could have had a lot more fun, but we were there, together (along with about a quarter-million of our fine friends). Your welcome, Jon Stewart!

And thank you, Jon Stewart! The needle on my sanity meter is moving in the right direction (I hope).

Oh yeah… And while talking to my Mom on the phone this morning, strolling around the block telling her about the rally, a leaf hit me right in the chest, sticking there long enough for me to make the official catch. I still plan to take the tree-covered route tomorrow, but I won’t be concerned about which way the wind blows, or if it’s blowing at all. It’s all gravy now. You still might see me diving onto someone’s front lawn or running out into traffic to chase down a floating leaf. You might even see me chasing a few squirrels. But from here on in it’s just good sane fun.

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
Jon Stewart – Moment of Sincerity
www.comedycentral.com
Rally to Restore Sainty and/or Fear The Daily Show The Colbert Report