SOMATIC Integrity Blog: March 2008

The Emergent

Focusing on sensation reveals a deep vibratory unfolding emergent nature within our embodied life. Developing an awareness allows for embodied consciousness to fully participate in an unfolding moment. Practicing entering into the present moment is healthy. Utilizing a mature brain is allowing both left and right brain to experience attunement, simultaneous activity. Attunement can create a participatory coherence with any dynamic environment that is potentiated like a womb, full of possibility. As I experience this participating with the journey of any dynamic, I am open, and friendly to the moment, I feel deep gratitude and honor for the gift of being in life.

This is a learning experience that can be repeated and practiced and studied. The two hemispheres of our brain can coordinate and harmonize, and it requires practice through deep learning and participating in the emerging potentiation of our lives with ourselves and with the world.

Intuitive Focusing

INTUITIVE FOCUSING

There are several well developed methods that have been seeds off of Eugene T. Gendlin's work called: FOCUSING He started researching what "really" works in therapy. What he found is that when people get a felt sense, stay with that felt sense, and open to the felt sense that therapy actually works. This is truly a clear and well researched method of maintaining contact with ones bodily experience. The work of Focusing has been applied to many fields: management, listening, relationships, learning, a.d.d, lawyers, and so much more. Its also a great process to do with oneself as a tool to increase intuitive, sensory, intelligence. This is classic Right brain work.

The basic method:
1. Clearing a space: Tuning in and listening to your body, just being with what is, breath, feeling of chair, etc. Ask this, settled in space, what is between you and feeling good. Or ask another question that has relevance for you.

2.Felt Sensing: Feeling, slowing, and deep listening. The inner felt sense can be a range of sensations, images, emotions, words. (if you move into left brain thinking and figuring out, drop deeper into slow breath, and deep listening.)

3.Getting a Handle: When you find a "felt sense" that has a lingering, "hey this is it" feeling, open to images, words, or feelings to get a handle of what this piece of felt sensing is about for you.

4.Resonating: Test the image, word, or feeling with your deeper felt sense, is this accurate?

5.Asking: This could also be called searching, or opening, to the newness, or freshness that is emerging out of the resonating theme. Whats next as this intuitive felt sensing emerges? This is a process!

6. Receiving: Stay with the newness, the freshness, and open to recieve the felt sense, listening as your body's wisdom, the intelligence of being whole, contextualizes the felt sense.

Here are some great resources for this work:
http://www.focusing.org/

http://www.cefocusing.com/index.php
http://www.vegsource.com/biospirituality/main.html

THINKING AT THE EDGES:

Another work from Gendlin that he calls a practice of " The Philosophy of the Implicit"

In thier own words:

"Current science, social policy and human relations tend to exclude the intricacy of the individual's experience. TAE is a way to think and speak about our world and ourselves by generating terms from a "felt sense". Such terms formulate experiential intricacy, rather than turning everything we think about into externally viewed objects. Language and concepts that emerge directly from experience can point to aspects of experience that cannot otherwise be formulated." from: http://www.focusing.org/tae.html

Evolving the Narrative

Knowledge is just a rumor until it's in the muscle.
-- New Guinea Proverb from: http://www.alancohen.com/

WE BLOG:
What I am doing in this imaginal-telecommunication-cyber-communication place, this blog, is to assist in reclaiming our collective story, our collective narrative. What is it that we are telling ourselves about the world We are hostages to our own fortune. What leadership do we embody? Is it that of reluctant reaching? I would reach out to a friend, to the world, to a beautiful landscape. So I reach out to you and invite you to share in a new narrative design. I would like to share the stories, the in-formation, the joy in rediscovering a beautiful world. One that we build and grow through an investment in working together, right now, in present time. We are the ones we are waiting for. We are human beings that reflect and can exercise our capacities to care, to design, to love, to play, and to create. Its a good time to tune into and share some right brain growth.
CONTENT TO DESIGN:
The following is a powerful right brain, biological capacity:
"On a biological level compassion acts as almost the polar opposite of the fight or flight response. When young children and adults feel compassion for others their heart rate goes down from base line levels which prepares them to not flight or flee, but to approach and soothe. Compassion produces oxytocin." Dacher Keltner U.C. Berkeley see:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/
http://www.madisonmonkeys.com/masserman.pdf.

USING CONTENT:
We have a world of content and information, but what I am interested in is the use of this content. Most of my early learning was of disjointed facts and figures and as I grew, I discovered its not the bits of information, but rather how I utilize and synthesis meaning and life into content. This blog is exploring a whole new learning: advanced learning, whole mind learning, embodied learning. This style of learning design is a process of investigation and practice that can powerfully weave left brain learning into a coherent map that lives in our whole bodymind. When we combine feeling and thought we grow and growth is joyful. New learning for a new time to design and live a beautiful future right now.

USE THE BLOG AND JOIN THE STORY:
I hope you enjoy this Blog and can utilize the information to inspire and re-tell a story of life that is beautiful. Reclaiming our somatic capacity to self-design is simply growing in to mature, receptive, compassionate and caring humans.
thanks
Scot

Intention and Thoughts

Thoughts have quite a bit of power. In both Cognitive psychotherapy and in Somatic therapy thoughts can change our physical organization and how we relate to any particular dynamic. Imagine designing learning and transformative events with experientials that put us into direct contact with the power of thought. See below for some of the latest science on thoughts and intention.

The Intention Experiment:

Results of the first three experiments

The Intention Experiment has run six intention experiments so far – with extraordinary results about the power of intention. We’ve demonstrated that intention from a group scattered around the globe can affect living light — in everything from algae and leaves to human beings.

see: http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/

also see: http://oneminuteshift.com/videos/lynne_mctaggart_video/can_intention_change_the_world

Creating Synergic Power: Designing the future

The future of our transformation will include a deep education of collaboration and supporting humans through synergy. Like plants need sun to grow, we need a force, an energy, a motivation to grow and develop. The following themes can easily be integrated into designing human gatherings, meetings, classes, conventions, families, schools, and more. How would you use this information?

The Driving Force - values and quality of life

An Application of Synergic Power: Ten Principles of Human Development

1. The principle of free existence. [choice]
2. The quality of perception principle. [vision]
3. The strength of identity principle. [confidence]
4. The principle of competence. [diversity]
5. The principle of authentic and intense commitment. [participation]
6. The principle of suspension and risk. [courage]
7. The principle of bridging the distance. [mutuality]
8. The principle of self-confirmation and self-transcendence. [respect]
9. The principle of dialectic leading to synergy. [balance]
10. The principle of feedback ordered into complexity. [development]

Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man, 1971 in N. Arthur Coulter, Human Synergetics, 1976, Chapter 17

from: http://www.calresco.org/wp/synergy.htm

Research on Love and Longevity

LOVE: What is the force of love? Are we able to choose brain states? What brain do you live in most of the time? How is it for you to be generous? How do we actually love? Some suggest that love is good for your health, check out the following quote and link to learn about research being done on love. Leave comments, thoughts, stories, etc.
Thanks
Scot

"The evidence to be accumulated herein supports the following hypothesis: One of the
healthiest things a person can do is to step back from self-preoccupation and self-worry, as well
as from hostile and bitter emotions, and there is no more obvious way of doing this than focusing
attention on helping others. This transformation of being and of doing seems to promote
emotional and physical well-being, and odds are, will add some years to life."Stephen G. Post, Ph.D. Download this article from:

http://www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org/publications/goodtobegood.html

Embodied Belonging

"And as Shakespeare says in Hamlet: To thine own self be true, then as surely as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false. The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught in the false game of judgment, comparison and assumption. More naked now than ever, you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will ever be able to take from you. At the deepest level, this adventure of growth is in fact a transfigurative conversation with your own death. And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all fear.”
-John O’Donohue-

How do we begin the life of belonging? Belonging to ourselves, our bodies, our earth, our communities, etc.? It is here that we must search, but this journey begins by using a level of experience that we have marginalized, that of the right brain. Its like our collective culture has been ignoring this side of our life for so long that it is not there any more.

"The main theme to emerge... is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres respectively and that our education system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere."

-Roger Sperry (1973) from: http://www.viewzone.com/bicam.html

How do we begin a journey when we have been mistaking the map for the territory? Thoughts? Questions?
Thanks
Scot

more links:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

http://www.danpink.com/wnm.html

http://www.jodonohue.com/