We are each in a unique constellation, organization, and/or configuration in response to our environment. Our environment being the human and natural environment of our experience, so parents, siblings, family, friends, neighbors, city, culture, news, global moods, forests, buildings, and on and on. Our environment is richly complex, interdependent, and woven in feedback loops from the small intimate experience to the large global and social experience. Our experience is self-organized by layers of intimacy and layers of contact within different proximity's of intimacy. We cluster in small groups of intimate contact, be it partnership and love or friends and co-workers and thus navigate the world through small portals of those that know us and those that we pass by, environments that are familiar and environments that are not. We constantly transition these realms and layers, yet rarely notice the shifts in our Somatic life that cue us to these changes, aside from the shifts in our comfort and ability to tolerate change and to be flexible internally in the face of dynamic change. Anxiety would be an example of intolerance of change, expressed as not enough breath and an inability to move the upwelling of overwhelming sensations building up throughout one's body in the face of transitioning through the layers of intimate proximitys.
We are born into this layering structure and each respond to this richly complex environment in a multitude of ways, reactions, and responses. Some of us may be more comfortable in the outer layers of intimate proximity, preferring to be more social than intimate, helpers, hero's, and staying away from depth and contact. While others may prefer to stay in the inner intimate proximity and relating only with a few close and trusting others. Depression can be one form that prefers only the most interior intimate proximity of our self, thus creating alienation and isolation.
Our body/Somatic life contains the collection of familial responses, unconscious, and adaptive behaviors that have been successful to keep the family alive, the individuals alive, and each system has a point of tolerating stretching this adaptive behavior. This can be seen in our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). This is an ancient nervous system found throughout biology as the primary interface between our inner and outer world. This can be as simple as contracting, hardening, and mobilizing vital energy in the face of an attack (fight or flight) to the simple sounds our our intestines digesting food into usable energy(rest and restore). Each family system has a collection of family strategies that swirl through the family nervous systems over generations making small increment changes and subtle evolutions. Every member of the family may adapt a particular constellation of these strategies, thus each one is unique, yet we will all utilize the same pool of strategies and each tolerate a particular stretching of the system.
Our breath contains the subtle clues and cues of the thumbprint of our strategy. Our sensations are the language of our biological-familial-system and our personal narrative stories, our thought life are the ripples at the surface of embodied life. This Somatic life is, in my opinion, is the place that we can most grow, stretch, change, and transform our own personal experience within the thumb print of our familial nervous system.
