New Inspiration

I am continually inspired and refreshed at the processes that reveal our natural unity, our functional integrity. When I look at nature, biology, etc, I see that we have had a habit of the last 100+ years of reducing life down to its parts, yet it has not revealed what gives us motion, what is the motility of life. Through Somatic Integrity, I am continually discovering that natural unity is not a secondary aspect to be sought out, but rather is our primary natural state. Reclaim your natural integrated democratized soma: body and mind; a vital unity! This statement is my new feeling around this work. Through Somatic work, we are able to experientialy feel our integrity and thus free up our life from the symptomology of being trapped in a dis-integrated Soma.

in construction

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/experiments/H-Reflex.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/010528.html

Sensorium=Somatic Intake

A radical synthesis is underway between the multitude of disciplines and sciences.
Alan Schore (2003) has said that it is at the edges of each discipline that the innovations and discovery of new understanding occur. It has been my attempt to help in creating, participating, and shaping the emerging edges of Somatic psychology and Somatic education, yet as my research continues to expand I find new terrain. We need whole new maps to constellation the exponential unfolding our our ever increasingly complex world. We are going have to practice levels of consciousness that are at the edges of our current consensus or academic and scientific understanding. They are radical shifts, not because other levels of consciousness are new to the human experience, but because what restricts their presence in our daily life are imperceptible boundaries. These are the boundaries of our entire mental, emotional, and physical, social, and sensory ecology. Like the fish who asks all the other fish "what is the sea?" These boundaries are held inwardly by defensive fear, rigid identity structures, protecting our deepest infantile existential terrors and the haunted-ness of perceiving outside of our family or cultural systems. Our deep mammalian need to survive requires interdependence, fitting in and at the cost of the evolution of our species capacity to rapidly respond to a newly emergent world.

Tapping into the consciousness of the body is the gateway, the firm foundational orientation to the present. At this launching point, our perception, guided by the gathered energy of attention, both cognitive and bio-electric, we can then tap the integral field of sensational information. Our complex behavioral systems are unified by embodiment and gives us endless access to states of knowing, perceiving, and consciousness that have in the past be rapidly clumped into the woo-woo, the paranormal, or some other way to categorize reality into black and white, left and right, and good or bad. This classic way to split thought and attention into either or's maintains that we rigidly simplify reality, by dominating perception, both internally and externally, and those of us we are in relation with. Unifying attention through sensational awareness, or body awareness is classic in martial arts, psychotherapy, zen, music, dance, etc. Looking at the various domains that have tapped into this research is vast, but as of late, my train of A.D.D has taken me on this tour of the cyber realms.

The term sensorium (plural: sensoria) refers to the sum of an organism's perception, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorium

The somatic nervous system (SNS) is the part of the peripheral nervous system associated with the voluntary control of body movements through the action of skeletal muscles, and with reception of external stimuli, which helps keep the body in touch with its surroundings (e.g., touch, hearing, and sight). From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_nervous_system

Somatic psychology, also referred to as Body Psychotherapy, is an interdisciplinary field involving the study of therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body, somatic experience, and the embodied self. The word somatic comes from the ancient Greek somat (body). The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek psyche (breath, soul hence mind) and logia (study).
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology

"Although both McLuhan and Innis believed that media were biased according to time and space, McLuhan paid particular attention to the "sensorium," the effects of media on our senses. He posited that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. For example, the phonetic alphabet stresses the sense of sight, which in turn affects how we think: linearity and objectivity are the results."
From: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/002033-2010-e.html

I have been listening to a group called JEL and in one line they call the media; Weapons of Mass Distraction. The nature of the Sensorium is rapidly changing as attention is more and more gobbled up by the demands of a perceived world and the WMD's. Everyone of my family and friends in TX says that time has been very fast, full, etc, yet they consume the attentional T.V., the blue flicker of "either or" world views. This side fighting that side. From a psychotherapy stand point, this polarization is a function of splitting or dissociating. Like the narcissistic character structure, the thin transparent veneer that is used by our ordinary identity to buffer the empathic information of the sensorium; perhaps grief is driving this WMD. The grief that we are confused and lost in a sea of distraction, no meaning, no purpose.


"McLuhan believed that media exert effects by reshaping the ways in which individuals, societies and cultures perceive and understand their environments. Thus, he saw the goal of media studies as making visible what is invisible."
from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/002033-2010-e.html

Embodied life unifies perception, so that we can better organize the complexity via higher integral unifying perception that is not bound in the rigid small identity structures, but rather are mirrors of natures high systems. Like a whole eco system, like music that plays attuned and empathic of the living Sensorium that they create together, like a meal that is cooked with attention, time and care.

The Laboratory for Sensory Ecology is a multi-disciplinary laboratory focusing on how organisms acquire and respond to information about their environment. Although we mainly study crustaceans and chemical senses, we are interested in any research at the interfaces between physics, sensory biology, ecology, and behavior. We perform research in a number of different areas and at a range of organizational levels including physics, chemistry, neurobiology, computer simulations, animal behavior, and ecological interactions.
From: http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/honors/LSE/index.htm

969,000 hits for the word Sensory Ecology

The field of Somatics is naturally an integrator, as is our own somatic life, the unifying consciousness, that grounds our attention in the moment, thus opening us to new found resources of higher perception. Not higher as better than, but more like an umbrella of perception.

"The only way to produce a techno-culture of debate at the speed of technological innovation itself is to take up these technologies in the service of aesthetics. Aesthetic contemplation buys us time and space."
From: http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/book-review-sensorium-embodied.php

Lets make a beautiful life by making art from all that we do.
Thoughts on this ramble?
scot

T.V.

So much watching! I wonder why we as a nation are so into the T.V. and the couch. Are we bored or hypnotized? Has our embodied being-ness become so unstimulated by our tactile life that we prefer the over stimulation of the visual cortex?
s

In-spiration

I have not posted in some time, as I have been inwardly searching for my own voice. As a student, I have read immense amounts of material in books, online, research, etc, yet when I write I generally find that I am writing other peoples thoughts. I generally synthesize material into new forms, but still it is not really original. So what am I trying to say, not that anyone needs to listen, but the process of my seeking is bringing up some good inner work.
I have been in Reichian therapy now for many years (5 now) and recently had, several awakening experiences over the 5 years, and the latest experience was really interesting. I have been working through some very old throat armoring, way old. So old, that my nervous system has forgotten how to open, yield, or soften, some of the more subtle mechanics of fascia, muscle, and nerves. I have begun to notice an area can take up to 3-7 sessions to move a primary knot of numb disconnection-disassociation and bring the feeling/sensational experience back into the integrity of my whole somatic organization.
My last session was a movement of a major knot, literally. As always I began the session with deep open breathing, slowly building up my bio-electric charge, which reveals the present organization of my nervous system, and then following the movement of sensation. This movement generally begins as reluctance to feel anything in the form of yawning, thinking, talking, coughing, itching, etc, all of this is my habitual way to block the depth of my feeling. As my resistance builds, I am more and more agitated, which leads to frustration and anger. This time my anger disappeared into despair and quickly into apathetic frozen-ness. This was new and I tracked it as a trauma fear cycle that had been covered and covered and covered and covered by years of life. Out of the frozen-ness emerged an intense cough. A quick note about this cough: I have had a wide range of throat issues since I was very young. From 9-12 I had a coughing tick and most of my life I have had an issue with phlegm, so the cough has come up every time I get to a certain spot in my therapeutic process. I had recognized it as a somatic marker, but I have no traumatic recollections. Nonetheless, the cough came literally out of the frozen apathetic state I was in and choked me. I could not breath for 1-3 seconds and as I came out of it, I felt a wave of intense liberation, thus opening my breath, neck, throat, and back muscles in a new way. I had a keen realization that muscle, fascia, breath, nerves, brain chemistry, diet, emotions, and way of being were all held tightly in a bundle of contraction.
With consistent effort ticking away at this in therapy, I have moved a major block in my life. Whats interesting about this is now I am asking questions such as; "What is it I want to say?"
Stay tuned and "What do you want to say" and "Do we think for our self?"

Working with the pulsating autonomic nervous system

The ANS
The ANS is the regulatory branch of the central nervous system providing homeostasis and a central communication for our entire body and for our experience in the environment; both the social and natural environment and our inner sensational environment. It is important that we see the ANS as the interface between the mind and body, and also between the world and ourselves. The ANS has been researched and investigated by many branches of science. The ANS also has been a focus of many questions surrounding human behavior: body, mind, and self. Somatics supports both a theoretical umbrella and an interpretation of research supporting the lived experience, which focuses on the ANS. The research available is both qualitative and quantitative and many years or clinician experience provides theoretical, and practical experience based on observing the ANS. Essentially the literature that I review and the evidence embraces the fundamental principle of Somatics, that we are body-mind-consciousness, integrated and whole, experiencing life from the inside out and outside in. As Caldwell (1997) says, “in a sense we could say that somatic psychology seeks a unified field theory of human nature.” (p.2) This unified field theory of human nature requires that we as somatic scholars become master synthesizers, inter-disciplinarians who can pull from a range of fields. With this in mind I am seeking to synthesize a range of models, information, and research to introduce an educational experience that is both somatically healing and psychologically educational.

The Pulsation Model
A major thinker and creator of Somatic Psychology was Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s (1942) charge-discharge or ANS pulsation model can provide insight into deeper functions and implications of the ANS. Reich’s tension-charge-discharge-relaxation model developed from observing how the ANS is a sensory processing system as well as a balancing system. Reich proposed that we pulsate, as our ANS flows between parasympathetic (expanding) and sympathetic (contracting). The free oscillation of the ANS is optimal for health, both mental and physical, and that balance is not a static state but rather the ANS’s ability to freely move between the two poles, expanding and contracting. Because life can be traumatic, this pulsation can become interrupted and thus stuck in one of the four possible beats or rhythms: tension-charge-discharge-relaxation. The “stuck” is held in place by muscular rigidity, thus helping the muscle move through the four beat cycle, would help the body return to a place of flexible mobility and ANS regulation. The theoretical foundation of Reich’s function of the charge-discharge framework is the free pulsation of the ANS, thus our biological consciousness can freely adapt and respond to a diverse environment and return to homeostasis. The movement of energy out from the ANS uses the parasympathetic pathway and the movement of energy toward the core uses the sympathetic pathway. According to Reich: “we grasp that the parasympathetic nervous system operates in the direction of expansion, “out of the self-toward the world,” pleasure and joy; whereas the sympathetic nervous system operates in the direction of contraction, “away from the world-into the self,” sadness and un-pleasure” or possibly into a protective mode (p.288). Although his statement may be accurate within his clinical observations, research we will later investigate shows that both sides of the ANS will innervate in either pleasure or pain. Reich explained that bioelectric energy moves in and out of the “vegetative core” and he links this core to the abdominal region as the production place of biophysical energy. This energy can be witnessed looking at the natural flow of the breath, by observing the diaphragm and the movement of the body while breathing. His framework is used to this day by a range of Reichian practioners, clinicians, and is essentially a map for trained therapists looking to witness the ANS in breath, body movement, cognition, pathology, and in relationship, and response to the therapist. Clients are then able to process unprocessed experience (trauma, attachment issues, self structure issues), thus allowing for a greater range of flexibility, adaptation, deeper contact, and tolerating intimacy (Aposhyan, 2004, Buhl, 2001, Grossinger, 1995, Totten, 2003). Although Reich’s model is not complete, it offers a simplified way to understand one primary function of the ANS, which is to pulsate, digest, metabolize, and balance sensory experience in the movement of breath, body, and mind.

Affective Attunment and right brain reorientation

As I study the latest edges of psychobiological development via Neurobiology, I am taken to see that we are imprinted with the dyadic impressions of our earliest interactions with our primary care givers. As infants we grow through the experience dominant right brain, as the left comes fully online from two years old onward. Taking this idea through the life time of development, I am wondering if we are imprinted continually throughout all ages. So during the teen years we are imprinted by the complex weaving of our deep intersubjective core self and the socialization process of attaching to adolescent peers, subculture identities, music, etc. Further into our twenties we are again imprinted by leaving the family to create our autonomy. These imprints are deep unconscious, right brain, implicit forces that effect our deeper emotional life. Leading us to live out in a variety of ways, with a variety of choices all governed by the implicit impressions of our emergence from infancy to adulthood and onward. Without Somatic awakening these deeper implicit forces will make choices through us as core reactions and hungers. What I am thinking is that without self knowledge in the form of an ever increasing felt sense through the introception of the nerves of our internal physical life, we are at the whims of impressions and culture. Thus the way to autonomous interdependency, full human-hood, loving and deeply gratified beings, is to fully process these impressions. I think these deep impressions are most likely a cause of deep dissociation and muscular numbness, which leads us to collectively believe we are our thoughts and superficial identities. Yet lying underneath this superficial self is the deep fulfillment of living in our core perceptual truth of deep embodiment. What seems to prevent the full expression of this core self is both social forces ruling the impressions through absurd and unspoken taboos and a deep fear of loosing the identity that we do have. The fear of loosing this identity is wrapped up with the deep fear of feeling our most deepest emotions: grief, terror, shame, and oddly enough pleasure. This collective quagmire is promoted and supported by most of us. I would like to support an inner-revolution, not based on a switch of power structures, or financial, or philosophical ideas, but rather an emotional freedom to feel as a sentient aware conscious being
Thoughts
Scot

JohnOdonohue

The senses as thresholds of soul:

"For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us. This belief has strained our longing disastrously. This makes us lonely, since it is human longing that makes us holy. The most beautiful thing about this longing; this longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom. If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing. Thus it often happens that the longing reaches out toward the distant divine, but because it over strains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness, or negativity. This can destroy you sensibility. Yet we do not need to put any strain whatever on our longing. If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us." John O'Donohue

Object Constancy

Much like this flower expresses a consistent rich complexity, we to express a similar pattern. There is a theme in parenting, in relationships, and in developmental psychology around this complex pattern being consistent for the formation of healthy interaction.

This is on object constancy, which is object constancy is "the capacity to recognize and tolerate loving and hostile feelings toward the same object; the capacity to keep feelings centered on a specific object; and the capacity to value an object for attributes other than its function of satisfying needs." from http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/objectrelations.html

This is important in the development and creation of a secure sense of self. As children mature, they need constancy to trust the repair-ability of life, with out repair or more specifically interactive repair life can essentially be seen-perceived as a terrifying place. "Its all broken", "Its hopeless", I am not enough", and "the world is unjust." Fostering hope, inner security, and ambition can be done in every relationship:relationship with self-other-community. Here is what HH Almas says about object constancy:

Object Constancy

The separation-individuation process leads ultimately to the development of the ego as a structure. Its final phase is that of object constancy, when the ego is formed and established as a permanent existence, separate from the environment (mother), and other people are seen to have separate existences. Finally, the ego is structured and developed, and the child permanently experiences himself as having a separate identity. (Essence, pg 160)


Object constancy is usually defined as the capacity to see and relate to the other as a person in his or her own right. This capacity is part of the quality of the Personal Essence, of being personal and able to make direct personal contact. (The Pearl Beyond Price)

Object relations theory contends that object love, which is love for a separate and differentiated human person, does not develop until object constancy is attained. In fact, it is part of the definition of object constancy that when it is achieved the individual has the capacity to love another as an individual in his or her own right. (The Pearl Beyond Price)

from: http://www.ahalmaas.com/glossary/o/object_constancy.htm



So what would this look like in practical action?
Regular patterns of interaction are:
• Emotional availability
• Nurturance/empathy
• Protection
• Comforting
• Teaching
• Play
• Willingness to repair
• Mutual self reflection
• Respect of developmental edges

These are only a few that are implicit, but when brought to the for of interaction with all of life, they are elucidated and become explicit. This will support the development of connection, team building, partnerships, social relationships etc. Try some of these out and comment below or feel free to share these with others.
Thanks
Scot

Brain education and CNS videos for learning

This video is super basic brain info. To study the brain and its functional understanding is like learning a language that takes time, but i am finding it to be a profound make that elucidates the complexity of our physiological and conscious life.

This next video is also a super basic introduction to the link between the behavior of the Autonomic nervous system and our health. This same information needs to be integrated into education. After this video watch the next link.




this is a great educational somatic example of how to integrate, brain function, physiology, and consciousness into advance learning.
Thoughts
Scot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnbpyqWo7zk

The Business of Being Born: The Movie Online

http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=45525


This is a good documentary and WOW! Share it and send this around.
thanks
Scot

Trauma, PTSD, and the Globe

I am currently in a course focused on Trauma, Post Trauma Stress and PTSD @ my school- Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. Through the research on trauma and the language around trauma, I have been able to give further conceptual and empirical credence to my own thinking around facilitating, designing, and teaching psychological and personal growth and development. As I investigate PTSD, I am struck by the fact that Wilhelm Reich was addressing the very issue, surrounding the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Autonomic nervous System(ANS). Although Reich possibly found every psychological issue to be a baseline disturbance of the ANS, currently psychology sees PTSD as only one among many DSM issues. As I reflect on my study and experience of Reich's work I find that all of his treatment work was possibly parallel to many of the new somatic based trauma interventions. Also I am wondering if all Reich treated was the idea, as his literature points to, that all of culture is traumatizing and to wake from the "jail" was through somatic, sub-cortical, ANS implicit experiences to metabolize our trauma and to awaken to life's natural and free oscillating pulsation. If this is true then the Somatic Makers (Damasio, 1996) that regulate a looping of somatic sensation, or trauma looking for a way to metabolize are possibly doors to somatic processing. This could be said more clearly as emotional looping and cycles are the experiential point to enter in order to elicit change and new choices. This truly changes our relationship to deep affect, or deep old pain as being gates to consciously process the past life. There are many thoughts about the nature of the past, but as I investigate trauma, trauma research, and clinical history, we see a robust base to conclude their trauma is literally looping. caught in our CNS, despite time and space.

So with mind only we stay in a loop between somatic markers, the pain memory, the pain body. One of the big theme of working with trauma is safety, especially if the trauma is human to human. I would propose and I would like to research how culture, as it is now, as a whole, is traumatizing. This is a great management system, just look at TMT

This is where I think developing soul-essence-being-right brain strength becomes an orientation that supports and develops the pain body into a garden of growth and development. As Neuroplacticity research shows we are biologically set up to grow, change, and transform the nature of our Whole experience. Thoughts? Share?

The research out of the many Domains of Psychology, and if you the direct research citations let me know, is saying that essentially there is no mind with out a body and no body with out a mind. The interface, the bridge of the body to mind communication is the CNS, the ANS and the Vagal Nerve. This is the realm of pure experience and the realm of possible change or possible loops.

This information is truly important for our time, as we enter a new world, with very complex issues, and a profound increase in decay, and mental illness, just look around. We all know people that are experiencing some physical manifestation of illness, and yes all of this is debatable from a wide rage of perspectives, but while we debate the world is mutating very quickly. What are the natural skills, the natural inherent intelligences that we can cultivate? What conversation can we have that is important that will assist all of us in maturing with the rate of change in our world? I propose we work with each other to support the experience and mobilization of our CNS and our ANS. This would in turn support the use of the prefrontal cortex, higher thinking, thinking like compassion, sensitivity, adaptability, balance, design, and maturity.

Thanks
Scot

In My Language

As you watch this video consider how many languages we actually speak, but yet are culturally cut off from and thus have forgotten. This is a profound insight into the nature of "Ways of Being", consider how many marginalized voices there are in the world and even in our bodies. Our ideas and notions are being challenged and thus we can invite this challenge and open to a range of experience and possibilities that perhaps were previously deemed by consensus reality as "not right". Perhaps in light of this video, many assumptions about our experience of this reality are false and must be explored through new lenses.
So much in our virtual world is being communicated, that opens my heart to the beauty of being human, being perceptive, and listening. This video speaks volumes to the intelligence inherent in all things and all beings. Please post comments! And definitely watch the whole video! and SHARE!
Enjoy
Scot

Somatic Coherence Practices

http://download.yousendit.com/03B3C8A93146087A

Hello All,

This link is for some exercises that I have put together for my somatic small groups that are a 10 week seminar called "Embodied Belonging". Feel free to try out some of these practices I have developed. Any feedback?
Thanks
Scot

Polyvagal Theory

http://www.stressrelease.info/overheads/Copenhagen_May_2003_I.pdf.


Download this PDF on Stephen Porges "Polyvagal Theroy"

Overview: The Polyvagal Theory
1. Evolutionprovides an organizing principleto understand
neural regulation of the human autonomic nervous
system.
2. Three neural circuits form a phylogenetically-ordered
response hierarchy that regulate behavioral and
physiological adaptationto safe, dangerous, and life
threatening environments.
3. “Neuroception” of danger or safety or life threat trigger
these adaptive neural circuits.
4. New models relating neural regulation to health, learning,
and social behavior may be reversed-engineeredinto
treatments.