somaesthetics

Some recent research lead me to these links (thanks Tivo). They are a definite core trajectory of somatics off of phenomenology and hanna. As I track the evolution and progression of somatics, I find that multiple areas of focused attention via academia, dance, psychology, cultural practices (chi gong and yoga) and independent thinking humans have come to similar conclusions, but through different language and cultural lenses. This realization keeps coming up for me as I read a range of thinkers from Emilie Conrad, Bert Bennett, to Thomas Hanna. We each have a profound capacity to awaken to experiential realities based in our bodymind that lead to states of being and awareness that are birth rights and at the most fundamental direction of natural uninhibited biological development. Thus all of the variety of soma based creativity that turns into "modalities" seem to just mirror our inhibitions and thus create the need to cling to a self created form of embodied awareness. This form that has emerged out of natural biological trajectories then becomes an economic anchor. Why do somatic creators make modalities? This is a bigger question that has some obvious answers, like each system needs skin and boundaries and a shape to live, much like ourselves, yet some how each modality becomes rigid in time. This is one reason I am so drawn to this link:
http://wise.fau.edu/bodymindculture/

"The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture is an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to promoting research, programming, and teaching of topics concerning the body-mind-culture nexus. The Center’s motivating logic affirms that the three terms constituting its name are essentially interdependent rather than separate entities and that they therefore need to be studied in terms of their interrelations and through interdisciplinary research."

We somatically driven folks need to collaborate our efforts and focus our thoughts, maps, and modalities to support the natural and biological trajectory of embodied awakening for each human and for each human group. The collective illness and insanity of our time is greater than one modality, as it will take a collaborative effort to reawaken enough bio-energetic presence to care in the face of a dynamically changing world.

I had dinner last night with someone who manages portions of a state funded agency that provides psychological care for people in the lowest economic stratosphere of America. I have also worked with addicted teen women from this population. In our conversation last night, I was mentioning that I had the intuition that this population was exponentially growing due to greater and greater amounts of cultural illness swept under the large American rug. I track it as nervous system issues passed from ancestry to ancestry to ancestry, thus the ghosts of embodied agitation keep looping through the familial systems, supported by culture and then amplifies its agitation each generation in younger and younger off spring from the generation. His response was that he too was witnessing this and that the many agencies he works with have also seen waves of large spikes in highly traumatized beings that are fall out from the past generation's inability, biological inability, to parent or love their children. This leads me to think that love is not automatic even in the face of a lymbic system. As Joeseph Chilton Pearce points out a defended mother will produce a baby with a larger hine brain and thus will be more defended.

By bringing the vast somatic map into convergence we can track multiple streams of research, science, philosophy, and good old fashion intuition to understand how to help not just our own, and very needed healthy narcissism, but to actually create ways to aid our culture, our earth, and our future to............?????????????????????

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Shusterman