Layers of Intimate Proximity
We are biologically self organized in nested layers of intimacy. Just note the 'felt sense' when you communicate with your children or your partner compared to talking to your neighbor, compared to going to a party, to a farmer's market and on. Consider these the necessary filters to protect infancy, childhood, and even our own personal interiority, the private experience of our self. Then consider this in terms of an ever increasing global society. Consider this in relation to news and information. Consider how we interact with these layers based upon our beliefs about the layers. For instance:
1. If I have had the continual experience through the layers of Intimate Proximity (IP) that people are untrustworthy, then I will interact with all realms in defensive postures, thoughts, and actions. Protecting my core through each layer.
2. If I have never had much contact in the variety of IP layers with diverse people then when I do meet them in the outer layers, I will respond defensively.
3. Say that I have been raised with a range of fluid experience across the IP layers, then I will be comfortable with a range of transitions within IP layers.
We transition in and out of these layers daily. The transition is filled with somatic information. This information is in the form of:
Sensations
Shift in-breath
Unconscious disassociation
Loss of ground-shift in weight
Subtle or not so subtle contractions of expansions in musculature
Social Anxiety: Fear of contact or fear of being alone
Longings
Repulsions
Judgments
Intuitions
and more
Because we generally move through these transitions quickly the information is lost in our pace to get to the next place. Our pace maintains the habituated interactions and relationships that we are patterned to. Unconscious relational patterns through the IP layers are collectively maintained by policy, schools, infrastructure, but more importantly by our own somatic life. When we slow our pace we slow our perception and can attune to nuanced experiences that are coursing through our entire nervous system. When we attune we begin to have more options, fluidity, and reflective power to interact in creative ways with the diverse layers of the IP.
When I teach I utilize IP layers to carry, contain, and exchange more ways of understanding the information that I am teaching. Much like an eco-system, students will each offer and exchange how they experience a particular concept, which focuses their own experience and yet expands their possibility and range of experience. I created a mid term based on this idea. The success of the mid term was astonishing to me. In fact the students through the exchange of knowledge, perspective, and experience created ways of understanding the subject that where new, novel, inventive, and revealed an emergent understanding beyond what I had presented.
I have also applied the IP layers to drug addicted teen women. The process that I facilitated, which is experiential, managed the group at a new level. Most of these women have been abused since birth and suffer from a life time of PTSD, thus managing reactive behavior was very challenging. Within a few weeks of my process, i was able to create a more supportive environment within the facility and create more group self regulation. Rather then having these highly abused women autonomously self regulating, which they cant, they were self regulated by the IP layers of the group. Thus free exchange of information and feeling is passed through the layers.
What I love about this work is that our 'felt sense' is naturally attuned to these IP layers, so with a little training these biological cues are exposed. Rather than the information being too ethereal or esoteric it is easily felt, tracked, and worked with.
Enjoy
Scot
