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...
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.htmlPHYLO’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)….
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
1 http://www.wordreference.com/definition/cohere
posted by Dr. Mark @ 7:31 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Somatic coherence techniques Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with extra information? It is extremely helpful for me.
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