Themes for July 26th to August 22nd

A few years ago, the movie Shrek gave me all I’ll ever need to explain somatics to anyone in a few words. In case you missed the exchange between Shrek and Donkey in that movie, here’s the whole thing once more with feeling…

Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to ogres than people think.
Donkey: Example?
Shrek: Example? Okay, er... ogres... are... like onions.
Donkey: [sniffs onion] They stink?
Shrek: Yes...NO!
Donkey: Or they make you cry.
Shrek: No!
Donkey: Oh, you leave them out in the sun and they turn brown and start sprountin' little white hairs.
Shrek: NO! LAYERS! Onions have layers. OGRES have layers. Onions have layers... you get it. We both have layers.
Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. [pause] You know, not everybody likes onions. [pause] CAKES! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers!
Shrek: [restraining temper] I don't care what everyone likes. Ogres are not like cakes!
Donkey: You know what people really like? Parfaits! I mean I could easily say, "Ogres are like parfaits. I likes Shrek the ogre 'cause he's my friend, and come on, who ain't don't like no parfaits? Parfaits is delicious!" Shrek: NOOO!!! YOU DENSE, IRRITATING, MINIATURE BEAST OF BURDEN! OGRES ARE LIKE ONIONS! END OF STORY! BYE BYE! [whispers] See you later!
[pause]
Donkey: Parfaits may probably be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet!
Shrek: You know... I think I prefered you humming...

In somatics this metaphor is made lucidly real when you consider the interconnectedness of all living systems and the integration we pursue as individuals. When you look at it side by side, the impact is driven home…

Scenario #1: Somatic Indifference
* Biological Incoherence

(a split in attention between you and the world)
* Physiological Dissolution

(a socially-triggered, systemic stress response)
* Psychological Dissonance

(fosters a self-limiting belief system)
* Anti-Social Disengagement

(promotes an affect of prejudice and avoidance)

Scenario #2: Somatic Integration
* Biological Coherence

(a unified attention between you and the world)
* Positive Physiology

(a biologically-regulated self-organization)
* Positive Psychology

(fosters resilience and a self-transcending belief system)
* Full Social Engagement

(promotes better pair bonding and dyadic resonance)

The issue is that in this culture we work from the social layer to the biological one and end up with ‘one size fits all’ solutions to the challenges we face. With the Soma Made Simpler protocol, we’re reversing all that. By using the common ground of the shifting biological rhythms as the one true ‘one size fits all’ point of origin, we’re demonstrating that although we all differ slightly as individuals if we get down to our DNA, we still share the experience of these daily, weekly and monthly rhythms. Conditioning ourselves to be aware of them holds deep payoffs.

We discussed the six somatic interfaces in the last post. We also went over how they intertwine with the longer cycles we experience of the ~180 day and yearly lunar cycles. Within each monthly rhythm, there’s a psychomotor ‘wind’ that we can align with to biologically refresh ourselves. Of course this is fractally present at smaller scales within the daily and hourly regulatory rhythms as well. What we’ll be doing now that the client base has had a little time to get used to doing the SIMPLES in the Soma Made Simpler protocol is to make these six ‘upgrades’ part of each private session’s theme and the focus on what we’re now calling “Coherence Coaching”. You’ll here more about that exciting service in early AUG.

Here’s the way the world is patterning us within that ‘web that has no weaver’…

1st Lunar Cycle – Summer

emphasis is on improving your breathing patterns
2nd Lunar Cycle – Summer

emphasis is on improving your movement patterns
3rd Lunar Cycle – Summer

emphasis is on centering your tactile/thermal patterns
1st Lunar Cycle – Fall

emphasis is on improving your reflex response patterns
2nd Lunar Cycle – Fall

emphasis is on improving the body’s many pulse patterns

3rd Lunar Cycle – Fall
emphasis is on improving your vocal patterns of speaking

This makes all of somatics a cyclical process of opening this chain of being…

* We are born with an inherent bias for self-preservation (or we would not survive)
* That bias filters us to develop specific patterns of adaptation (The 4 Domains!)
* Those become our habits that we quickly internalize and take for granted
* Over time, we collapse this whole constellation into our identity (core beliefs)
* That identity is then used to guide and regulate our behavioral choices in life
* Breaking this chain triggers symptoms similar to trying to break an addiction

The end result is that we face near impossible odds of making lasting positive changes in our lives in the all important, but much-neglected 2nd half of it….

You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?” Change or Die! -- Fast Company May 2005

Look at some the ‘new’ facts of living…

80% of the health-care budget is consumed by five behavioral issues.
too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise

600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States

1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties - total cost of ~ $30 billion.
two years after these procedures, 90% of have not changed their lifestyle

People who live to 85 have a 50-50 chance of being senile
the issue for everyone besides heart patients is "change or lose your mind"

So when you’re sitting at your desk rolling your eyes through another Quick Fix or talking yourself through a Cross-Crawl as you commute, realize you are ‘bioneers’ that are part of the first wave of self-exploring somas that willing to get weird before they get too old inside to desire the benefits of peeling back all those layers.

Next post here will be over the weekend of AUG 12th and 13th after the full moon.

Til then, be your own onion, MRF 07.29

Further reading…
http://www.energyschool.com/writings/triune_autonomic_article.PDF http://www.energyschool.com/writings/polyvagal.pdf
http://www.energyschool.com/writings/triunewww.PDF

Developing a Fractal Sense

Most people think of their identity as a given. They wake up, go to the mirror and recognize themselves there and pretty much go on to face the day. Yet the conversations I have with clients about their identity are anything but a given. In fact, it's the focus of many cases. Who am I doc? What will I become? Who will I be when I do? That's is where the use of the 'Coherence Calendar' you find on page 11 of the Soma Made Simpler factors into all this. As you'll soon realize, the material you're learning is 'easily blended'. The reason why is that it's done with a certain code that is the hallmark of all living systems. That calling card is called fractals. All livings systems are fractals, clusters of patterns that are evident on different scales, but it does much further than just describing those patterns.

Fractals utilize a principle called 'self-similarity', which is what keeps living systems sustaining their core patterns on all the different scales it operates on . That's what we claim is a fixed identity. In reality, it's a very intricate dancing tree-form that perceive as being whole. If that were true, we'd have no need to take in new information or adapt at all since we'd 'know it all'. The good news is that the biological rhythms we're tracking exude this same sense of an intertwining pattern and scale to give us a new, more open sense of self that is not as solid and definable as before.

Let's begin by re-visiting some the new words to the party. Getting at 'street level' awareness of these concepts will go a long way to helping you get the most of the protocol. The three linked concepts I want focus on now are these:

1) Entrain
2) Cohere
3) Coherence

When we entrain, we enter into a bond with our activity. In other circles, it’s called ‘tuning to the task’. This capacity to ‘dial in’ is already within us. We do it automatically and develop our habits and routines. Entrainment can elevate or heighten our awareness, as we see with prayer, meditation and healing modalities. It can also deepen and strengthen our attention as we see with hypnosis, biofeedback and martial arts. Even music, reading and other everyday activities are entraining to us. That’s why a good walk can clear up a cloudy mind. It’s also why we seek ‘comfort food’ despite having every intention and good reasons not to go run for it. We’re already entrained.

The key to the protocol is to take all this passive entraining we do and develop an ability to actively cohere. I defined this in the Soma Made Simple protocol and it still applies here: a capacity to hold together in a mass that resists separation (1). That makes this all tangible. If entraining is an act, to cohere is bring that act to fruition, to link task and target. If you think about it in terms of form or taking shape, we begin with an image of how things look when they are whole. Your routines are all cohered to you. For instance, you know what your clothes will look like, feel like, etc… when you completing the entraining act of getting dressed. The same goes for a meal you prepare or an e-mail you write. We spend much of lives entraining so many poorly formed patterns of behaving so it’s a bit of a wake-up call when we attempt to break code with them and effectively shift our identity from a closed and complete one to an open and incomplete one. The journey from closed to open is as immediate as a heartbeat and as remote as reincarnation. The distance is taken care of by our fractal nature. It’s all scaled to fit us.

That brings us to coherence, which is a measurement of how well we cohere when we are entraining (follow that Filippi logic) and presto, we have a nice little triad now. We can take actions that entrain us to behaviors that allow to feel the joy of being cohered to our tasks (athletes call it The Zone) and we can think with greater a greater degree of coherence, which directly relates to our overall sense of well-being. This is all fractal.

When you examine your Soma Made Simpler protocol, you see the parts, but not the whole picture. Here’s a secret – NO ONE SEES THE WHOLE PICTURE. All we need to see if the pattern and we have it. My biggest complaint with all the metaphysics I’ve studied is that they give us models of wholeness that are remote and complete. They hand us a microscope and a telescope and say wholeness exists – OUT THERE in the macro and micro worlds we never get to enter. But the calendar offers us some keys…

In case you didn’t know, we go through a really big transition at the age of 4. We begin to distinguish time from body. This allows us to construct a past and future timeline that we can feel (our Intended Self that we perceive as ‘us’) and see in our mind’s eye (our Extended Self that we perceive as our collective memories and desires/fears). This distinction is reflected in our EXOsomatic (outside the body) connection to the calendar.

What we get back with the Soma Made Simpler protocol is a way to tracking the identity shifts we go through on different levels over different intervals of time. Again, return to the notion of seeing yourself as a fractal. All the units of time you function in, be they yearly, semi-annually, seasonal, monthly, weekly, daily or all the way down to the 4-second window of social cognition carry a connecting pattern of entraining actions. The more you can access that in the timeless moments of truth each day offers, the more you’ll ‘cohere’ to the wholeness within you. In effect, you’ll flower from inside-out…

Here’s some interesting quasi-coincidences to consider…

We have 6 somatic centers, 6 somatic interfaces which contain the Spectrum of Positive Gains…BREATHE-MOVE-FEEL-ACT-RELATE-EXPRESS (another 6). This 6-ness is then plopped into the 3-ness of the entraining windows of each lunar cycle, as Roger Lewin depicted for us so well in his “Making Waves” book...

So, in effect, if we split each lunar cycle to a rising phase and a falling phase on either side of the full moon, we get back 6 more entraining windows over 3 months Then if we double that over 6 months (which is what psychologists now call a transition cycle), we can see each lunar cycle as an entraining window. Finally, if we double that, we get a year or two transition cycles (12-ness) that carry in them the 6-ness of each ~180-day, ~90-day and ~30 day loop we live…

Now if we turn our attention to the 4-zies, when begin with that 4-second window, which our brain pings 15x/minute or 150x/hour or 3600x/day search for coherence in one of the 4 domains of somatic orientation it can cohere to… That maps to the four, 6-hour blocks of time we experience each day as well… That is then mirrored in the 4 phases of each lunar cycle and our ‘rising moods’.That is also a way to view the 4 seasons; which brings us back to the 3-ness of the monthly/seasonal map.

Are you beginning to see how time and body relate?

Which also reminds me…all 4 domains have a 6-ness dialect for transitions…
PHYLO’s – use the 6 YES Factors
ONTO’s --- the aforementioned Somatic Centers
ECO’s -- the Somatic Awakenings within the two of those (hey, 3-ness!)
EXO’s – the Somatic Interfaces

There’s plenty more, but all of these ‘insights’ are useless unless you know how to use these with ‘indexicality’ – our ability to ascribe multiple meanings to a common ground.

More on that here..(if you dare)….

http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2004/vol8/lissack_mr.html

So to sum up, we’re all 4 year old EXO’s when we look at the calendar. We can plan our future and reflect on our past as the holidays, anniversaries and birthdays roll by over an over. To re-gain our depth, we need to apply the other 3 domains and link our entraining actions to cohering feelings. This impacts our overall coherence and allows our identity to shift it’s reference point around the domains to optimize our social lives…

As you begin to do your SIMPLES/REST periods on the 18th (6am-9am, 4/4 alternating over an 8 minute interval), you’ll experience the power of your fractal nature. It’s forever.

Tacitly, MRF 07.16

Some fun books to keep this thread going…
The Tao of Chaos
Pi In The Sky
The Advent of The Algorithm

Number and Time

Notes
1 http://www.wordreference.com/definition/cohere

Themes for June 25th - July 24th

Welcome to the 'bridge'! This blog will represent my virtual 'flare' to the entire community of free thinkers that have crossed my path at some point and want to really 'get' the latest ripple in my work. What I'm offering here, in this post, is two-fold. First, I'll give an overview of the lunar cycle we're currently reaching the summit of late MON night. Then I'll give you a way to connect that to what will be unfolding over the next five lunar cycles that follow, which deliver us to the Winter...

These essays are meant to introduce concepts that influence how I work with my private consulting clients while at the same time give you ways to apply them personally. One of the cornerstones we need to get to right away is the notion of The 4 Domains, which has become somewhat of an 'inhouse' lingo at The YES Center for the newer clients who have been part of this latest evolution in The Extended Self Program's design and delivery. Let me fill in some blanks here.

When I encounter a client, I see them in 6 distinct, yet interconnected ways. These "interfaces" are learned or noticed in sequence, but we experience them simultaneously. The best example I can give you is when you watch TV, all the other channels are still broadcasting, while you're 'tuned in' to just one of them in this moment. As these "interfaces" become sharper and more precise for you, your capacity for what I call 'harmomic awareness' will increase in it's intensity, frequency and duration.

That means a more open and defense-less life is rooted in your biology, not your social conditioning.

Let's take a run across a spectrum that comprises those six interfaces...

1) Soma to Soma
2) Human to Human
3) Individual to Individual
4) Gender to Gender
5) Whole Person to Whole Person
6) Co-Creator to Co-Creator

Since they're all interconnected, I tend to call them *somatic interfaces*. The idea is NOT to think about any of this, but to make it all 2nd nature. In order to do that, we need to study and deeply acknowledge the inherent bias we all cultivate during early development. This is where The 4 Domains enter the scene.

As I write in the new Soma Made Simpler protocol, these 4-fold maps are plentiful, whether you chase archetypes, personalities or other metaphysical labels. WHAT we are, since we're all somas - as far as the cosmos is concerned - boils down to knowing our primary domain. They are subsets of our fully integrated 'extended self', which unifies us at the social level.

What you see below are the 4 distinct somatic orientations we get exposed to as we develop...

PHYLO's -Bonding, Temporal, Receptive – Social Regulators {Relatives, Citizens, Neighbors}
ONTO's - Binding, Figurative, Conceptive - Social Couplers {Leaders, Philosophers, Visionaries}
ECO's-- Bounded, Spatial, Deceptive - Social Isolaters {Mavericks, Savants, Revolutionaries}
EXO's - Blended, Literal, Perceptive - Social Profilers {Futurists, Translators, Judiciaries}

I'll be sharing much more on them in future posts.

If you want a little more to go on, go print out my one-page overview I posted in the YES library last year -- The 4 Domains

Each year we go through 12 lunar cycles that take us through 4 seasons. If we clean all the messy extra days and the slight dissimilarities between what the moon says and we the calendar tells us, we can effective USE time to tranform our lives. Each lunar cycle has a theme, an undercurrent that is begging us to re-connect. The 'bridge' we're crossing takes us to that realm. We'll be learning that how we live is governed more by the laws of nature as they express themselves through us than the events of our personal past, present or future. While the protocol offers you resources to employ day to day, my aim on the blog is to give you a target for each lunar cycle. I want you to see how you are wired for harmony and that every life change you experience, on every scale, has a 'reflective rhythm' you can align with in the moment and carry with you for the rest of your lifetime.

The lunar cycle we're in now is the 7th of the 12 we'll have this year. The biological year actually begins with the first new moon after the Winter Solstice, so now we're in the midst of the first lunar cycle of the Summer. Lucky #7 gives us a 2nd chance to work on what we started around last Christmas. The theme for both of these lunar cycles is SECURITY. We are focused on cultivating a greater sense of overall well-being - a more desirable 'status quo' that we can then mobilize as the succeeding months wind us down from Summer to Fall and into the introspective Winter ahead...

Each lunar cycle offers us 4 lunar phases to attune our mood and somatic orientation so we get the most of these biological 'givens'. The protocol details these, so I'll just mention that here to drive home the point that your identity is NOT fixed within you, but freely roams the environment. Your job is to call that signal home, since you alone possess the receptors for it within you. If you can do this for 6 lunar cycles in a row, you'll have re-connected to all six interfaces and you'll have the basic foundation of harmonic awareness to help you develop a more coherent relationship with the world.

I know, this is all Soma Boy jargon now...so I'll finish here with one question to ponder until July 24th

*If you say, write or hear the word HOME,

where does it take you?*

Your answer is your guiding image.

If you get a rolodex of images, you need to focus on your breathing rhythm until you get just one. I'll post here again next week as we begin to play the hand the full moon dealt us.

To get a free copy of the 11-page Soma Made Simpler protocol, just drop me an e-mail me at addchiro@mindsping.com and I'll send it over. This whole thing is organizing rapidly, so write soon!

Tacitly, Dr. Mark

PS: Be sure and join us for the inaugural WOOWOOPALOOZA, September 8th & 9th...

Visit www.woowoopalooza.com for all the latest news and notes about the WOO!